BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Lowell the Poet, in the Words of Lowell the Man

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: June 10, 2005

To judge from this hefty but handsome volume, Robert Lowell and his contemporaries, who included Randall Jarrell, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Peter Taylor and Elizabeth Bishop, seldom picked up the telephone. Nor, except for Lowell, who was sometimes parked in front of the tube during his periodic stays in mental hospitals, did they watch much television or go to movies.

What they mostly did was read, write, listen to classical records and drink a little (or a lot sometimes); and instead of calling they sent one another letters of a sort that few people write anymore. It's hard to imagine that the collected e-mail messages of, say, Jorie Graham or Billy Collins could be as satisfying and as revealing as this selection of Lowell's correspondence spanning 41 years, from a boastful, slightly obnoxious letter Lowell wrote to Ezra Pound in 1936, when he was a freshman at Harvard, eager to become Pound's disciple, to some poignant fragments written to Caroline Blackwood, his third wife, shortly before his death. ''I haven't quite lost my muse,'' one of them says. ''Isn't she a presence, like God, and not like Robert Graves's young girls?''

Part of what makes the letters so interesting is that they frequently don't sound like Lowell the poet. He was a meticulous, sometimes obsessive rewriter of his published work, which even at its most colloquial has an almost classical polish. On the other hand, his letters, as Saskia Hamilton points out in an introduction, were spontaneous and immediate, and in them we hear the voice of Lowell the person, not Lowell the formidable public figure.

Some of the best ones are newsy, gossipy, even a little catty. A few, especially from the early years, are a bit unctuous. Lowell was always buttering up elder figures like Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, and he fawned a little over Jacqueline Kennedy. There are lots of thank-you letters (Lowell never lost the good manners of his Brahmin upbringing) and not a few in which he apologizes for something: for getting drunk, for dominating a dinner party or just for not writing back sooner. His correspondence, one senses, was a kind of lifeline connecting him to his fellow writers, egging them all on in their lonely and underappreciated endeavors. There's a certain amount of shoptalk, discussions of books and music, but just as much of what might be called cheerleading and friendship maintenance. For those who knew him, this will come as no surprise. But for readers to whom Lowell is mostly a towering and aristocratic figure from the anthologies -- our last great public poet -- the revelation here will be how warm, engaging and generous he was, especially to younger poets.

The book also has a plot of sorts. It is punctuated by Lowell's breakdowns and hospitalizations, which took place with almost tidal regularity until 1967, when he was put on lithium, which stabilized him somewhat without entirely curing him. Sometimes you can feel them coming on. The letters get longer, become a little antic and disconnected, and soon Lowell has a new girlfriend, is announcing his imminent separation from his long-suffering second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and is sending imperious telegrams, like this one commanding Bishop to join him in Buenos Aires (where he thought the C.I.A. was trying to kidnap him): ''Dearest Elizabeth Come here and join me its paradise!'' Lowell at his most manic had visions and hatched political schemes. At one point he even considered running for the Massachusetts State Senate and tried to recruit Pound, of all people, as an adviser.

More often the breakdowns are unannounced and the reader learns about them in a rueful letter written from one sanatorium or another -- from the Institute of Living, for example, where he wrote to Ms. Hardwick: ''During most of the day I transfer to a unit called Butler II, where the patients are adolescents, some wear long hair and almost none have finished high school. I won't go into the boredom of 'leather appreciation' and ceramics appreciation.''

The process of coming down from a manic episode was always lonely and dismal; he compared it to ''a cat or a coon coming down a tree.'' There were apologies to be made and wreckages to be repaired. This account, sent to Bishop in 1961, sums up what had become a familiar and regrettable pattern: ''I was in a hospital for five weeks or so, less high and in an allegorical world than usual and not so broken down afterwards. Once more there was a girl, a rather foolish girl but full of a kind of life and earth force, and once more a great grayness and debris left behind me at home. Now we are back together, wobbly but reknit almost.''

Elizabeth Hardwick was Lowell's rock of stability, and some of the fondest letters here are those describing his domestic life with her and their daughter, Harriet. He continued to write Ms. Hardwick even after his tempestuous marriage to Caroline Blackwood (their relationship was ''two earthquakes crashing,'' he said), and after breaking up with Blackwood, he was on his way to Ms. Hardwick's apartment when he died in the fall of 1977.

But in some ways the great love of his life was the other Elizabeth -- Bishop, the poet he considered the best of their generation and the one whose work most influenced his own. Their relationship began with mutual fan letters (''You are a marvelous writer'' he wrote to her in 1947) and soon ripened into friendship and something more. They were soul mates, and his letters to her have a depth of feeling and intimacy that outshines all the others. It was Bishop to whom he first reported, almost shyly, the poetic breakthrough that led to his National Book Award-winning collection ''Life Studies,'' and she with whom he commiserated when, one by one, the poets of their generation began prematurely dying off.

By far the longest and oddest letter in the entire volume is one Lowell wrote to Bishop in August 1957. For most of the way, it's a sort of nautical comedy, recounting the martini-fueled misadventures that beset Lowell and his companions on a cruise along the coast of Maine in a 40-foot ketch owned by the poet Richard Eberhart. Then, near the end, Lowell suddenly changes tone and recalls an episode a few years earlier when, at the tail end of a crack-up, he had awkwardly tried to propose to Bishop. This was folly on almost every level: Bishop was a lesbian and spent most of her life in Brazil with the architect Lota de Macedo Soares. And yet Lowell, even in hindsight, can't quite let go of the idea. ''Asking you is the might have been for me, the one towering change, the other life that might have been had,'' he wrote, and continued: ''Now it won't happen again, though of course I always feel a great blitheness and easiness with you. It won't happen, I'm really underneath utterly in love and sold on my Elizabeth and it's a great solace to me that you are with Lota, and I am sure that it is the will of the heavens that all is as it is.''

In that repeated ''It won't happen'' one hears, perhaps, a hint of lingering uncertainty -- a reflection of Lowell's essential revisionary impulse. As this valuable collection makes clear, he tirelessly rewrote and reimagined everything, including his own life.

Photo: Robert Lowell (Photo by Associated Press)

Correction: June 11, 2005, Saturday
A picture in Weekend yesterday with the Books of The Times review, about ''The Letters of Robert Lowell,'' was published in error. It showed the columnist Murray Kempton, who died in 1997, not the poet.